


Omnis Vivens Moritur

by catasterisms (Half_Life_Wolf)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Grimdark, disturbing imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 10:12:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16808605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Half_Life_Wolf/pseuds/catasterisms
Summary: In a doomed timeline where the beta kids and trolls are trapped together in the Veil, Eridan begins to hear the voices of the Horrorterrors. To Rose goes the unenviable burden of advising him.





	Omnis Vivens Moritur

I.

Coils and coils of dark strange shadowed things twine on, writhing down deep under the edge of the universe. Out there all is blackness, and cold, and void, and nothing-- nothing but the weird whispering songs of dead gods speaking to each other in ancient expired tongues, soft words like the susurrus of rustling brown-wasted leaves scuttled across frozen earth by winter’s breath; like the call and response of any other ghost reaching out ravenous towards the living. Darkness, and cold, and entropy. Deep space steals heat from the burning tremulous spark of each sun until one by one they gutter and wink out, each standard candle blown to smoke and memory, an after-image against the eye and nothing more. Then all that is left is the tendrils of that darkness, slopping and slipping across each other as entrails, as viscera slide around in the rotting cavity of the body, those ichorous many-limbed abominations.

And drifting atop this pit of caustic nothing is the world as a single soap bubble, fragile and vacuous and empty, with no promise to its name save that of borrowed time. The null session, a possibility pregnant with nothing, a fruit with no seed but soft pulp, ecstasy fizzled out before the moment of culmination from which the universe delivered only a miscarriage of itself; it tastes bitter on the tongue. Here all hope has flaked to cold ash, refuse from the idle forge of creation. In that timeless place, they wait out the end.

For his part, Eridan Ampora had personally exterminated all hope long since. The concept was a cruel joke; once he understood that, there was no choice but to eliminate it in himself. No hope, no yearning, no desire eating away the brittle bones and sweet meats of his body to acid. Only an inert numbness insulating all the anger and resentment and grief. With his harpoon in hand he had calmly killed all the angels, watched each bright burning star fall golden down to break open upon the earth, and had chosen the form of his own destruction.

_Prince. Destroyer. Despoiler._ They whisper these things to him now, not with despair or disdain but approval. _Annihilator. Executioner. Favored._ It makes him ill, bile ducts backed up and boiling. The voices are like echoes, like the sound of far-off waves through a shell, lapping at him as frigid rough water eats away relentless at the shore. Each word grates across the fragile construction of his ramshackle sanity like claws carving down slate, worse and better when they speak in tongues he cannot understand. Isolation does him no favors. _Come with us_ , they murmur, and he can feel the slimy press of tentacles wrapped around his wrists, his throat, burrowing in to curl around and choke his faltering heart like clinging vines. _Come to us, who love you._

(Eridan has learned this lesson, at least. There is no point in delivering yourself to the enemy in the hopes of a mercy that will never be bestowed-- hope being a lie as agonizing as love.)

When it is too much, when he cannot forget the copper taste of blood in his mouth, when he feels like a landed fish (hooked, something sharp and final caught in under his ribs and pulling towards an inevitable end), Eridan goes somewhere else. One floor down in the lab, three doors over. Five hundred and forty paces exactly, he’s counted, the way he counts the ceiling tiles and his own rasping breaths as they rattle against his ribs, because assigning these arbitrary quantities a value gives his mind something else to do. Five hundred and forty. He raises his hand to the door, fingers clawed and curled in on themselves like the stiff fists of dead saints-- a corpse already, moldering without a tomb. His white knuckles hurt when he raps them against the solid steel of the portal.

A deathless pause eventuates, filled with the low static hum of machinery, of sputtering electric lights in the hall, of horrorterrors crooning to him in their malodorous voices.

At last:

“Enter.”

II.

On Alternia, Eridan had loved and hated the ocean. It was his mother, it was his keeper. It was his refuge, it was his prison. It made him superior, it made him alone. On his wind-blasted rock in the middle of the open, raw sea he could see for miles and miles, all that grey salt-spattered nothing, a rough mirror that reflected the ink darkness of the sky, beautiful and empty. Below the waves was barely better, a silent graveyard. Yet it was his home, and the tender violet gills frilling his neck made it his, made him special, made him one of the myriad things the sea had claimed without consent.

His home was filled with driftwood, the refuse scavenged from wrecks. The sea was violent, and it was in his blood; blood, of course, being the only important thing, the only thing that mattered. Greedy clever hands had pulled treasure after rusted, rotten treasure from the punctured hulls of drowned ships: tarnished silver rings pried from the bones of fingers, polished and fit to his own; fine-stemmed goblets whose glass had gone milky; handfuls of coins stamped with the image and icon of emperors long forgotten by unforgiving history. All his wealth ancient and stolen; old money, dead money, inglorious in retrospect.

Perhaps it was them, even then, that had put the idea of Dualscar in his head. Perhaps it was the old gods, the wrong gods, the things that his best girl’s custodian had come from, that had sunk their spores in him like mold colonizing weak wood and grown all their blackness inside him, that told him even then: _Kill, rend, tear, destroy._ It is easier to think these things than believe himself for one moment a bad person, anything other than unfairly persecuted.

But then again, nothing at all is easy.

Rose’s boudoir is also filled with scavenged things, objects pulled from the pages of a certain sort of lavish romance. Heavy black and purple velvet draperies hang over every naked metal wall, tallow candles the color of heartsblood drip wax down wrought iron sconces. An antique rosewood writing desk displays a ravenfeather quill pen and a stack of books bound in leather of unknown origin. And to one side, spread out on a wine-red padded chaise lounge, is the Dark Lady herself wrapped in silk and cotton, magnificent in repose. Her claws are painted black as midnight and they clink musical against the glass of her goblet, filled halfway with rich dark liquid. Her eyes are sharp beneath their lids and she evaluates him with lazy, rote boredom as Eridan allows the door to slide shut behind him.

Her lips are black, too, glossy and shiny and wet, like the hard backs of beetles. Smooth licorice. The unseemly skin of the things that speak in his sleep. Eridan shudders; he wants those lips on him, swallowing and devouring, doesn’t want to want it. “Mistress,” he murmurs, and his voice cracks like spring ice.

“Eridan,” she says simply, unaccented, giving his name no value. When she sips her wine it leaves a dark smear across the glass. “It’s nearly noon. Couldn’t sleep again?”

“Time is a fuckin’ farce, Ros,” he rasps. He knows he looks more grey and waterlogged than usual, skin sickly clammy from chills no sweater can control, a lock of dyed hair falling from his coif and across the sharp bridge of his nose. “Nothin’ changes here, nothin’-- goes on-- are we even gettin’ older? Are we--”

Rose snaps her book shut with a clap and sets it aside on the back of the couch. “Stop that,” she says, not unkindly, and with a wash of cold relief Eridan stops, jaws clacking together painfully from the force of how quick he shuts up. It should rankle him, being bridled and directed around by a mere human, a squishy lower ape with blunt claws and bad teeth and thin tissue paper skin, but instead it quiets something in him he hadn’t known was hurting. He doesn’t like to speak too loudly in her chambers. There’s something holy here.

She draws herself regally up into a sitting position, side-saddle on the couch with her legs tucked up under her, and swills the glass in her prim fingers. “What do they have to say to you today?”

Invisible fingers stroke pathways down his spine as Eridan wrenches his jaw open. “Nothin’ good. Same old shit I already know about. Death, despair, corruption.” Hesitation, guilt. Eridan picks at the skin around his thumbnail until it peels away like the rind of an apple, revealing slick wet mealy flesh underneath. “They want me to go.”

It’s hard, being eight sweeps and almost a man and haunted by the pulsing hearts of nightmares. It’s hard, and no one understands but Rose, who beckons him shuffling forward until they are close enough that he can feel the heat of her filthy mutant blood through her skin, close enough that the power crackling through her like tamed lightning makes his teeth rattle to their roots. Call it science, call it magic, she has claimed it and been claimed by it in turn, and bears the same searing brands on the ephemeral stuff of her soul even as he does, poisoned by that same prick of venom, that same bilious taint that despoils her brilliance. Rose Lalonde loves wizards and ostentatious faux-Gothic artifice and him, if the chunks of heart-of-star diamond dripping from the gorget around her neck are any indication, pale as the single Earthling moon for the shambling half-dead disaster of Eridan Ampora.

But the moon waxes and wanes, steady in its patterns, and some days she loves him full up flush with empathy for his pathetic plights, and some days her patience wears thin as a crescent line and disappears. Those are the days they wind up wands at each other’s throats, bruises and bitemarks and something beyond the physical; those are the days, when he does not belong to her, that he most belongs to _them._

Rose decides which day this is going to be. “Then we’ll go somewhere else,” she says, passing him her drink. The glass is vital warm from her fingers, the wine and the press of her lips fit sour and smooth against his mouth. “Somewhere they don’t own yet.”

“Like fuckin’ where?” Eridan demands, a little helplessly, hating the wheedling whine that lilts his voice.

She smiles. Eridan remembers: the moon controls the tides, pulling and shaping, and the tides are in his belly, in his blood. He surges and shifts, for her. “Somewhere that’s mine.”

III.

She spins him a snow globe.

First she leans up, takes his thin face between her palms to guide him, blind him, keep him focused. “Do you trust me?” This is not really a question, nor delivered as one.

“On my life, Ros, I don’t have a glubbin’ choice.” He holds her hand at the wrist limply, fingers not committing to circling all the way around flesh and bone, trembling.

“I want you to dream with me,” she says, and sighs at his flinch. “Not like that. A good dream. You’ll need that silly scarf in it; you’ll need to believe, as hard as you can, in the cold. Feel it against your skin, first. Dry, brittle cold, enough to freeze, enough to nip at your nose, without being spiteful. Can you feel it, Eridan? Look at me and tell me you feel it.”

It isn’t hard to conjure cold. The vast void of the Medium all around them is nothing but, and it seeps into their refuge through every crack and thin place in the walls. He submerges himself in it at her urging, imagining chill air drawing the breath from their lungs in puffs of fast dissipating fog, frost riming the walls in lace; cold like the furthest nadirs of the deepest trenches at the bottom of the ocean, all sensation without crushing pressure, and he tells himself the lie of it until the water in his hollow bones freezes and his body is sure it will never be warm again.

“I feel it,” Eridan says, pointlessly. The ambient temperature of the air must have dropped twenty degrees.

“Good,” Rose tells him. “Keep looking into my eyes. Don’t you dare look away. I want you to imagine-- snow. Is there snow on Alternia?”

“Yeah. But not anywhere I ever was.”

It’s hypnosis, he assures himself. An advanced technique developed by those soothsayers who make their living off picking apart the minds of others, rifling around in the gross obscenity of consciousness. Each undulation of her tongue against lips and teeth is the tick of a metronome, slow and steady and lulling him into a suggestible state where he would do anything, believe anything, _feel_ anything, for her. The thought that the cold is in his mind is not a comforting one. There are plenty of things in his mind already that would be better not to escape.

Nevertheless, when she describes the snow to him, the bright brumal country of what had once been called Upstate New York, he is there. “There’s a glow to it,” she tells him. “It takes on its own refracted light. Imagine the air crisp, the light fuzzy around the edges. Think of the smell of pine trees.” Eridan can mostly smell the cold, sharp and blistering at his sinuses. “A sun made thin and silvered, hidden by overcast clouds, a solace and danger to no one.”

Her eyes are like old porcelain, shiny like glass; he can see the veins in the whites of them, the pits of her pupils that run all the way down, a window into some other astral sea. Through her, they watch him; he wonders what they see of her in him, a mirror reflected.

Rose removes her hands from his face, and the cold rushes in to sting a purpling blush to clammy cheeks. “Where are you, Eridan?” she demands.

“Home,” his heart says, breathlessly, and he breaks his gaze away.

They’re early in winter, here, in the here that is not the abandoned laboratory he has inhabited these long uncountable years. The snow is a loose wet powder, not yet compacted to dense drifts by time, and it glazes everything into soft round shapes. Whiteness goes on and on forever, each flake a pure prism refracting hidden light, and his breath rises up in smoke and steam, and the sky is grey, and it is _silent_. A hundred yards before them the treeline begins, tall conifers that bristle like soldiers in their rows delineating the boundary between _here_ and _there_ and _somewhere else_ , and there is nothing but an empty ringing in his ears, against the cavernous inside of his skull. Snow up to his ankles, swept over the tops of his tennis shoes where they punched through the featureless surface of it, beginning to leak damp and wet through the leather and the denim of his pantlegs, and there is such a swelling, howling silence, like a building that has collapsed. Something stretching, straining, burst, and a deafening absence in its wake.

“This is where I lived when I was a little girl,” Rose tells him, and her voice is the only thing in the universe. No still wind rustles the stiff boughs of the pines, no crow caws petulant and forlorn in the distance. She half turns to him, and the hem of her dress scrapes over the snow, brushing powder aside. It feels impossible that she was ever anything other than what she is, eternal, ageless, ripe and vibrant and full-formed, though of course he knew her when she was not, and he will know her when she has emerged into the hideous, exquisite thing she is becoming. They regard the building behind her together, squat blocks of utilitarian grey concrete, a thoroughly practical and joyless architecture.

“It’s so quiet,” Eridan says, aching, without comprehension.

“The most redeeming quality of snow, I find. Something about it eats the sound.”

She slips her hand in his and leads him through this dead, dormant world, towards her hive of long before. This dream is a memory, preserved for ever in amber, the stagnant image of a place that has passed away. A ghost world, a never-world, always and eternal and nothing, a part of her that she has made, too, a part of him, grafted into his own subconscious memories. Eridan tugs his scarf up around his chin to keep the tender membranes of his nose and gills from crusting over with a film of ice, and breathes heavy through his mouth into the wool until the humid wet of his breath forms its own uncomfortable clinging condensation there.

They enter the house.

Here they will pacify him, consecrate him, make him quiet also. Trollish culture had no concept of church or cathedral; Eridan’s first exposure to such had been the strange tall structures the angels had built, swirled with high-vaulted arches and colored glass like sugar candy, austere and extravagant in turn. Here is the same as there, and it sets the same anxious itch under his skin, spurs the same feeling of being trapped, wanting to break through, break free. Inside is empty, and hallowed by loss. The gnarled visages of stony sorcerers peer at him in haughty judgment from every corner, and Eridan thinks again: _home_.

And it is quiet, somehow even more so than out in the open air, each creak of a floorboard under her feet a single note that lingers. Rose is the only thing that moves, that sings, that speaks inside a dream where nothing else matters; the memory, and everything that exists inside it, exists only for her. “Don’t think too hard,” she advises him. “Don’t think at all. Just feel.” She brings him to the altar of a living room couch and they stand before it, her hands lifting his to the strings of her corset and leaving them there-- as though the knobbly joints of each long finger are an accessory, as though they belong on her body.

“Witch,” he says, reverent and accusing. Her title, and also a curse.

“The body of Christ,” she pronounces, mouth set in the sardonic shape of a venomous smile. “Come and sate yourself, and be at peace.”

His hands are moving, as if on their own, plucking each lace free, slackening the tension that crushes her ribs inward, breasts upward, presented for him-- moving as if in a dream, where conscious, lucid thought is secondary. It isn’t his dream, but even if it was, could he direct it? “I’m not a goddamned animal, Ros,” he hisses, and she sighs as he cracks her carapace open, lilac eyes fluttering half-lidded and sleepy with a sultry near-affection.

“Oh, Eridan.” Her disappointment is familiar and so well-worn as to be almost comfortable. “There’s no magic to this part. Underneath it all we’re every one of us only animals; fighting, fucking, living, dying, meat and bone and breath animated by instinct and synaptic electricity. Embrace that simplicity, for once, and shut up.” Her hands cover his, helping him awkward along.

He cannot drown himself in her, though he tries. Head empty of all cacophony but his own, Eridan is unavoidably present here, shallow inside himself, not overfull and bloated with the sloughing souls of something else. He feels like he’ll slide sideways out of his own body if he doesn’t touch her to ground himself. Stark grey snowlight washes over the slanting planes of her face, her collarbone, her throat bared to him, cloth and skin and all things monochrome save the striking amethyst of her eyes like jewels a greedy part of him hungers to pluck out and keep, and the ghastly horror of it is in not knowing if that thought belongs to Eridan who is Eridan, or Eridan who is someone else.

It is cold inside the house. Her flesh, which once ran feverish warm, has cooled beneath his claws. “Didn’t ever think it would be like this,” he mutters, and she shifts under him, the long silk ribbon-rope of her sash falling defiled upon the tile floor. They will violate this place shortly, pillage her memories, mix the pure snow with bitter tainted ash.

“That’s the price we pay,” she tells him, “for the privilege of getting to grow older.” He bites into her like an apple, and she steps into his arms.

IV.

Another dream comes to him in the witch’s house.

Now he sees himself in pieces, split down the middle; now the air is heavy with the luscious putrid perfume of rot. The iron beneath the severed cord of his spine is tacky with drying blood, rich violet that evaporates to a corroded film of black. Entrails unspool from the open, ugly gash in his abdomen; staring, sightless eyes frost over in their sunken sockets as skin withers sallow. His body, alone in the darkness, separated out into parts.

All flesh is meat to go warm and slick down some throat or another. All the common things he’s made of will melt back to mud and dirt, to base parts, espousing nothing sacred. This is the truth he is shown, again and again. The reality he is presented with. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing. No delusions of grandeur can evade and survive death, the revelation of butchered meat.

Now he sees himself whole, thick black thread in ugly lines like railroad ties zippering the halves of him back together. Fluid leaks wet around the final wound that will not heal, but this body stands upright, white eyes on him and accusing. A smear of that black dried blood scabs over at the corner of his mouth. Behind him stands a regiment, a complement of similar corpses, swaying and rustling in no unseen wind: cracked horns, split skulls, chests caved in, all wearing his face, all bearing his mark, all waiting for him to join their silent ranks. It is only a matter of time.

But Eridan need not ever join them, the unassailable nonsense logic of the dream tells him.

If Eridan wants to, he can live forever.

V.

Eridan is in Rose Lalonde’s parlor in a space station on an asteroid orbiting the nothing where Skaia used to be in the paradoxical space known as the Medium, and he has always been there. He has been awake for a very long time; realizing it is the same as coming back to present reality from a daydream, his mind having wandered quite far into the outer reaches of personal and private space and time. There is a buzzing under his tongue and at the back of his head and he can feel every atom in every muscle and sickly organ vibrating in tune with the background hum of the universe.

He is sitting in a hard-backed armchair, facing the padded wine-red chaise lounge where Rose reclines. She has been speaking for awhile, though it’s all fallen out of his near memory; far as he can tell, this is the point. The recitation, afterward, is like a spiritual trepanning, the steady even drone of her voice an auger drilling a hole in his skull wide enough for the sludge to slop out of. More mesmerizing is her state of indolent disheveled undress, bodice still open, breasts hanging out above her corset and rising and falling with each measured breath. When she slowly uncrosses and recrosses her still-sticky thighs, the fabric of her skirt falls open in just the right way to frame the punched-deep purpling bruise there just above her femoral artery, the scene of an old crime.

The pads of her fingers make a lush silken sound sliding down the paper, turning the page, and her voice is all around and inside of him, forming labial glottal syllables in a language he knows he understands, but can’t quite wrest meaning from at the moment. It all washes over him, comes to him as if through leagues of still water, sound beating muffled and smothered against his eardrums. A careful, dead-armed numbness invades each tissue of every limb, insensate, disconnection invading him the way the voices infect the vulnerable pulp of his mind.

_Come,_ slithers unbidden into his head, like a slick cold tongue curling up his aural canal.

“Rose,” he says faintly, urgently, voice sticking phlegmatic in his throat.

“...The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years,” Rose reads, without looking up, engrossed in her oratory. “All was well.” She shuts the book; another spell is broken.

An edge of desperation rides him, swelling like the tide. “Is that all there is?”

“That story is over, yes,” she tells him. “But picky and contrary as you are, there are other things you might like. Tolkien? Le Guin? The works of Lovecraft were always a fascination of mine, but staring into the eye of that particular abyss may only make the problem worse.”

“Not the wizards,” he says. “Fuck. This-- you, me, everything-- is that all of it? Forever? Just driftin’ out here like fish on a current, waitin’ to go mad or die?”

Sometimes when she looks at him, it’s the worst thing. Worse than the feeling of tentacles pushing around inside his head, eviscerating amygdala and medulla, intimacy and familiarity of that gaze breeding filthy discomfort. It makes him feel like someone dashed open his skull on the rocks of this asteroid and her hands are in the wreckage, sifting through bone chips and splattered grey matter. Her gaze rakes over him, flaying him, stripping him down to a cringing animal-- to meat.

“It’s a kindness,” she says, “that you were not anointed a Seer. Do you believe it would help you, to know if there was anywhere a world you fared better than this?”

“Can’t go,” he rasps. “Can’t stay. Can’t choose nothin’, Ros, it’s killin’ me. How do you deal with it, havin’ them in your head all the fuckin’ time? Tryin’ to tell you what you ought to be?”

Her gaze softens, such an infinitesimal bit he might have imagined it out of hope. “Here is the secret that I know,” she says. “I listened to them. And then I decided for myself, day by day, what was truth and what was lies.”

_Come to us,_ the many hissing voices beg.

Alone in his head, Eridan decides.

VI.

Down, down, fathoms below the water, so low beneath that not even the harsh scorching fluorescence of a malevolent sun could reach, down where pressure would pop ears and organs if taken too quickly, at the bottom of the ocean where the dust and silt of all primordial life gathered to rest-- down towards the end of the world went Eridan, bearing his tithes and grovelling gifts. He remembers that crushing pressure sometimes in his dreams, the weight of the world fit to fold him in half, crumpled in on himself like the weak thin walls of a plastic bottle, easily collapsed. Ribbons of multicolored blood trailed after him through the water, streamers celebrating where he’d been, cordoning off a path back home, hanging suspended in slowly dispersing curls like miter smoke.

White bodies of beasts bore that blood, the lifeless shells his offerings to an endless hunger, the pit of wanting that was Gl’bgolyb. She waited in a tangled mass of tentacle and beak, settled on the continental shelf at a place that had once been land before some unspeakable disaster sunk it, the remains of an ancient drowned city. Haunted spires of crumbling ramparts curved up from the mud, formless decaying structures returning slowly to sand, grown over with algae and strangling kelp. On his path, again and again, Eridan passed through half of a broken stone arch engraved with the saintly somber words _Omnis_ _Vivens Moritur_ in angular old Troll Latin: _All That Lives Shall Someday Die._

The sound of that beak crushing bone will remain with him, echoing inside his soul forever. The sight of dead blood rising through the water in a cloud, spilt from the lipless maw. The sight of her, large as a house and ten houses, herself the city, containing a multitude of screaming ghosts, singing to him, crooning, cooing:

_Come to us, be with us, come to we who love you._

Someday soon, he will deliver himself to the horrorterrors. He will, as he must, as they demand of him, bring Gl’bgolyb and her unholy court her final pound of flesh, the ultimate and only thing of any worth that Eridan has left to give, and then at last he will be at peace, surrounded by the voices and the quiet, surrendered and sundered, without need to know any more.

But today the moon pulls full at his blood, and Eridan will sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The book Rose reads from is, obviously, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
> 
> Did Google Translate give me anywhere near an accurate approximation of Latin? Who knows. Who cares. It's troll Latin. Don't think too hard about it.


End file.
